LDRA teams with TI on functional safety testing platform

LDRA is collaborating with Texas Instruments (TI) to provide automated unit testing capabilities as part of TI’s new SafeTI Compliance Support Packages(CSPs) for TI’s Hercules microcontrollers (MCU) software components. SafeTI CSPs help TI customers comply with functional safety standards, reducing verification and validation efforts so that they can focus on differentiating their industrial and automotive systems, which will accelerate time to market.

SafeTI CSPs for Hercules MCU software components make it easier for customers to comply with functional safety standards. SafeTI CSPs are now available for TI’s HALCoGen software, a graphical device configuration and driver generation tool for Hercules MCUs, and the Hercules SafeTI Diagnostic Library, a collection of software functions and response handlers for various safety features of the Hercules MCUs. SafeTI CSPs streamline software validation efforts and assist in achieving functional safety certification by including static analysis and dynamic analysis test results, code traceability to requirements, code coverage, and code quality metrics. LDRAunit, a complete integrated environment for automated unit test generation and management, enables customers to re-execute the included unit-level tests within their own environment in order to speed up system verification.

LDRAunit enables best practices in unit testing methodology by taking the smallest piece of testable software in an application, isolating it from the remainder of the code, and determining whether it behaves as expected. LDRAunit tests code units separately before integrating them into modules and then systems to simplify identification of which part of the code might be failing to deliver expected results. Easy-to-use yet extensive and sophisticated test automation and management options distinguish LDRAunit from other unit testing options. Using control flow and data flow analysis techniques, LDRAunit automatically generates test case drivers in the application language—whether C, C++ or another language such as Ada or Java—that are executable on the host development and target platform.

LDRAunit saves time and money in the verification process by automatically generating stubs for artifacts such as methods, constructors, system calls, and packages that are managed within a user interface. In addition, through its extensive analysis and test generation capabilities, LDRAunit applies a range of return and global parameter values to the managed stubs for fully testing stub behavior and configurable exception handling. This ensures that all code can be tested, minimizing the need for labor- intensive manual intervention.

All of these advanced unit testing capabilities will be fully accessible within the framework of TI’s new SafeTI CSPs.

The advanced unit testing capabilities will be demonstrated at Embedded World in Nürnberg, Germany, February 24–26, 2015, in Hall 4-432.